Merit Kask

Women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences inside an Estonian smoke sauna. Cleansing their bodies and baring their souls, they embrace the healing power of sisterhood.

Jeremia Juunas Kirotaja has been fighting in Afghanistan; 21 years later he returns to Estonia to his father's funeral. He has converted to Islam and his only connection to his native land is the sound of his daughter Angel's crying that he heard a long time ago on the phone. Jeremia starts to search for his family. The daily life - if this can be called life in the first place - of the dusty and abandoned town is being run by women since men are almost gone. Nevertheless, the women seem to hope that Jeremia will be able to do something about it in order to remove the paralyzing feeling of emptiness.

A different history of the Cold War: how Estonians under Soviet tyranny began to feel the breeze of freedom when a group of anonymous dreamers successfully used improbable methods to capture the Finnish television signal, a window into Western popular culture, brave but harmless warriors who helped change the fate of an entire nation.

In her fondest dreams, this film’s main character Leila (Riina Maidre) is a resplendent singer. In reality, however, all her energy and talent is spent on relationships that eat away at her soul, mind-altering substances, and glamorous showing-off. Heleri defies the rules. By playing with the possibilities of the art of film, she takes the viewer to an uneasy universe where the boundary between reality and illusion is incredibly thin. This is a world that is familiar to everyone who at some point in their life had to grow up and admit to themselves that dreaming is not enough on its own. And who have regardless of that chosen dreaming.